Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

One of the major issues in the study of newspaper texts is to find out in what
respects the lexico-grammatical structure is related to the overall organisation of the
news item. Lexico-grammar still needs to have a central place in the analysis of news reports. For in the Systemic Model, it only by starting with the system that we can see the text as a process. May studies about news reports tend to overlook the textual aspects and remain rather impressionistic. Very often, the data consist of linguistic fragments detached from the news context, which greatly undermines the integrity of the news text. Halliday (1994: x) is quite firm in this regard, he says: "a discourse analysis that is not based on grammar is not an analysis at all, but simply a running commentary on a text".
It is hoped that this paper will place in focus the way in which the linguistic
elements in a news text are built up for the construction of the overall text. We
believe that this issue still requires much more attention on the part of linguists
before some definite claims can be made about the form and function of press
reports.